The New Regime

A Partisan History Of The Russian Revolution

September 30, 1990|By Reviewed by Diane P. Koenker, Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-author of ``Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917``.

The Russian Revolution

By Richard Pipes

Knopf, 944 pages, $40

In the age of glasnost and perestroika, as the USSR gropes painfully to erect new structures based on democratic principles, the Russian Revolution of 1917 remains a pivotal event in 20th Century history. If the February Revolution removed Russia`s old regime and launched an intense eight-month struggle to define a new order, the October Revolution marked the victory of a certain brand of socialist ideology and inaugurated the first large-scale socialist experiment in world history. Like other revolutions in 17th Century England and 18th Century America and France, the Russian Revolution was a complex and controversial set of events and processes, and synthesizing the conflicting facts, perspectives and interpretations has been a challenge to historians.

Until recently, Soviet historians have emphasized the inevitability of the Bolsheviks` October Revolution and the genius of Lenin, who they say directed mass energies toward that goal. Western scholars tended, earlier in this century, to focus on ``objective`` political developments and on the intellectual origins of the ideas that shaped the revolution.

In the last 25 years or so, however, the historical focus has been on the complex social processes that underlay revolutionary ideas and politics. Making use of contemporary newspapers, as well as increasingly accessible Soviet archives, historians have explored the role and aspirations of soldiers, sailors, workers, peasants and rank-and-file party members, going well beyond the ideas and actions of a few exemplary individuals to demonstrate the depth of social discontent that underlay the fall of the old regime. They also have sought to understand how these processes interacted with political and economic events and policies to produce the contradictory, authoritarian socialist regime that has survived until the recent present.

In ``The Russian Revolution,`` Richard Pipes, former advisor to President Reagan on Soviet affairs and a Harvard history professor, has described a revolution that will be unrecognizable to those familiar with this body of work.

Pipes` book, which traces the revolutionary process from 1899 to late 1918, rests on two premises. Russia, he argues, was a nation of peasants that lacked the institutions to involve these peasants in the country`s political, economic and cultural life. (That the Russian revolution stemmed from an undeveloped civil society is a widely shared view, but most historians would argue that ``peasant Russia`` is an oversimplification.)

That leads to Pipes` second premise: Because Russia was not ready for democracy, any revolutionary attempt to achieve it would be a disaster. And he blames intellectuals for daring to impose their idealized vision of society-a rational economic order best achieved through socialism-on such poor material. Intellectuals and peasants, especially the former, dominate Pipes`

attention. Revolutionary intellectuals, he maintains, were the logical heirs of the Enlightenment tradition that argued that man is a clean slate, that good rulers and good laws can refashion individuals and make them virtuous. This led intellectuals to conclude that they, ``as custodians of rational knowledge, are man`s natural leaders.`` Democracy can temper this craving for power, Pipes says, but where intellectuals are excluded from public life, as in Russia, they lean toward extreme ideologies, where ideas-such as the innate virtue of the People-become more important than the reality of flesh and blood.

The archetypical intellectual villain was Vladimir Lenin, whom Pipes portrays as single-minded, secretive and ruthless in his pursuit of world power. Comparisons between the Russian revolutionary experience and Nazi Germany abound. Lenin ``hated what he perceived to be the `bourgeoisie` with a destructive passion that fully equalled Hitler`s hatred of the Jews: nothing short of its physical annihilation would satisfy him. . . . The trouble was that whereas Hitler would be able to produce genealogical (racial) criteria for determining who was a Jew, Lenin had no standard to define a kulak (a wealthy peasant).``

In Pipes` version, Lenin has an uncanny power to impose his will; the Bolshevik party is portrayed as Lenin`s personal instrument, a small band of dedicated, fanatical intellectuals, a monolithic, centralized highly disciplined militant organization. This hoary stereotype, cobbled together from Lenin`s 1902 pamphlet on party organization, ``What Is to be Done,`` and from Stalinist practice, long since has been revised by such writers on the revolution as Alexander Rabinowitch and Robert Service.

Moderate socialists fare no better in Pipes` account. His heroes are the generals and the defenders of the old regime, including Nicholas II himself.